Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. Maintaining accurate replicated backup storage of the information is often very important for a variety or reasons (e.g., disaster recovery, corruption correction, etc.).
Regularly checking or monitoring that the backups are actually restorable and accurate is important to proper maintenance. Conventional backup testing may attempt to determine if a write operation or transaction is completed but do not usually check the accuracy or integrity of the backup data. Any further conventional backup restore testing attempts are usually very limited (e.g., limited to a single machine analysis, not able to test application setup, etc.) or require a complete duplicate physical configuration that usually consume a vast amount of resources (e.g., multiple physical machines and physical network connections). These duplicate complex physical system approaches are typically expensive and inconvenient. Further complicating the issue are problems that arise that are relatively unique to particular system configurations.
One of the most difficult tasks in finding a solution is attempting to gather sufficient and relevant information. Some applications have prerequisites that should be addressed prior to completing testing in order to obtain reliable restore test results. For example, some applications have prerequisites that should be up and running and available (e.g., other applications, multiple devices, interconnections, unique test parameters, etc). Conventional approaches typically do not address testing associated with multiple applications or devices unless the multiple applications and devices are physically available and manually configured, which can be very labor intensive and susceptible to inconsistent human errors. The cost and expenditure of physically duplicating the requisite systems and networks often prevents the performance of backup restore testing as a practical matter, resulting in more instance of backup restore failures when the backup information is needed by the primary operating system.